Backups & Redundancy advice

I have one external hard drive I backup to, then on top of that my most precious work documents and photos I also backup online to Mozy. It costs a couple of quid a month for unlimited space. The first backup takes a while but then it just does incremental daily backups of whatever you change (which is normally not much in my case).

I don't like the idea of not having an offsite backup - fire? theft? water damage? Virus when both drives are connected? I doubt a thief would ignore a nice shiny external drive if they're going through the effort of stealing my laptop in the first place. I live in a dodgy student house where these are probably more likely than mechanical failure :p

Just another option I thought I would introduce!
 
bledd. said:
that's why we're saying to use two..

anyway, plenty of good advice in this thread already, in both raid and not raid
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You have got to draw the line somewhere FGS, you may end up with a daisy chain of HDD's and I seriously doubt even though peeps claim that the DATA is actually life threatening, prob mostly Warez and Multimedia and some college/Uni work for a handful of peeps.

I know I was near ill when I nearly lost it all mid format but its 99% Warez anyhow. ;)

My Raid 1 External is 1 Caddy and acts as 1 HDD.

Raid 1 was good enough in all previous threads, just some clueless peep calling others clueless in this thread above does not change this. ;)
 
External drive is a good way but when your main drive crashes you lose all the work you did since your last backup, if you have a RAID-1 mirror you have a constant backup.
 
Dutch Guy said:
External drive is a good way but when your main drive crashes you lose all the work you did since your last backup, if you have a RAID-1 mirror you have a constant backup.
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Which is why having both an internal raid 1 array and an external backup drive is best. If this isn't possible then an external backup drive is a better option than a raid 1 array without backup.
 
accod said:
Ahh but in that case I'd argue that the backup would be better as two separate drives rather than a single raid 1 volume ;)
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I think your still 100% wrong and you need a tinfoil hat TBH :p

Whats not to understand ?.

1) Caddy dies, take out both HDD's (its user serviceable), can even pop any 3.5" HDD in it you like.

2) 1 HDD inside Caddy dies, DATA (mirrored) is on other HDD.


:confused:
 
I'm not saying it isn't a good, I'm just saying that imo having two external drives being used for backups is better than 1 external raid 1 volume. For example, lighting strike or psu failure during backup could mean you lose all drives and data (including internal). I'm not saying its likely, just saying that since the cost difference between the two is minimal (since both comprise of 2 hdd's), I'd choose the separate drives.
 
And what do you do if your computer and the drives are engulfed in a house fire or, God forbid, a burglar breaks in and steals your main PC and the two backup drives you have sitting in the computer table drawer ;)

Backups are Backups - Raid is Raid.

A big removeable HD with automated scheduled backup - stored remotely. This should be rotated with another big HD. As the backups will also fail at some point.

I once had three drives go on me - all installed in one PC.
Drive 1 - The OS and Data
Drive 2 - Backup Drive 1
Drive 3 - Backup Drive 2

Drive 2 and 3 weren't even connected via the IDE cable, they were just powered. I got a short in the case and it blew everything. Even with new PCB's on the backup drives - I couldn't get the spindles to work. I wrecked all three drives beyond repair.

If you are gonna do it - do it properly.
 
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OMG I can see there is no end to the backup debate, I dare say a few peeps have some kinda nuclear proof *panic* room for their data! :D

We can discuss esoteric disaster scenarios to the cows come home but from my personal fifteen years + experience the only scenerio I have encountered time and time again is a a drive failure, possible due to overheating back in the 90's I had no ideal about hard-disk temps or cooling and had a bunch of Maxtor drives wedged into a small cramped hot case lol! :o

So yeah statistically the biggest threat to me personally is Disk SDS (sudden death syndrome) where a perfectly good disk will just up and die with no warning, total beach! :(

I guess the next biggest threat would be a slowly failing hard disk, starts with a few bad sectors or perhaps some weird clicking and slowly but surely it dies, if your on the ball and notice the symptoms you can get stuff backed up.

The last and slightly annoying scenerio is the missing/accidentally deleted file/folders, we try our hardest but every now and then stuff does manage to somehow disappear.

So mostly all nightmares can be avoided just by having any form of DATA redundancy i.e duplicates of data you consider important.

Yes your house may burn down, Yes a burgler could steal your PC, but the most likely problem many users will face is plain and simple mechanical failure of the disk itself . .

Bearing that in mind I wonder if it's such a good idea to buy two indentical disks from the same batch when running Raid-1, probably a higher chance of both drives failing :p
 
RAID-1 is backup against harddrive failure
External backup is protection against more severe stuff like computer theft, fire or water damage etc.

Both have advantages and disadvantages and ideally you want a RAID-1 array AND an external drive but you should keep the external drive outside your house in case your house burns down :p (and even out of the city you live in in case the North Korea fires a missile at the White House but messes up the targetting and hitting your city :D )
 
I use Acronis True Image when I can be bothered to backup to one of my two externals. I then check the backup by trying to recover random files, if that clears I then copy that backup (currently 90GB) to my other external drive. One is kept at home, the other at my house at uni. Some things such as music also appear on my iPhone/iPod so I have extra copies of these that can be copied back to my computer using iPod Access. I feel pretty safe after nearly losing all my data a year or so back when partitioning went wrong. Oh I, and some stuff is on the family computer too lol
 
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